Genocidal militia shells market in Sudan’s second-largest city, killing many

Genocidal militia shells market in Sudan’s second-largest city, killing many
Sudan war damage

A militia that has taken over much of the nation of Sudan attacked a market in Sudan’s second-largest city, killing at least 54 people and wounding at least 158.

“It was the latest in a series of deadly attacks in the escalated civil war that has wrecked the northeastern African country,” the Associated Press says. The dead and wounded include many women and children:

Sudan’s Doctors Syndicate condemned the RSF’s attack. It said one shell hit meters away from al-Naw hospital, which received most of the market casualties.

It said most of the bodies taken to the hospital were of women and children, adding that the hospital has a significant shortage of medical teams, especially surgeons and nurses.

The conflict in Sudan started in April 2023 when simmering tensions between the leaders of the military and the RSF exploded into open fighting in the capital, Khartoum, and other cities across the sprawling northeastern African country.

Saturday’s attack was the latest tragedy in the country’s brutal civil war. Last week, about 70 people were killed in a RSF attack on the only functional hospital in the besieged city of El Fasher in the western region of Darfur.

Sudan is in the middle of a bloody civil war in which both sides are brutal toward civilians. On one side is a genocidal militia — the Rapid Support Forces. “The RSF and allied militias have systematically murdered men and boys — even infants — on an ethnic basis, and deliberately targeted women and girls from certain ethnic groups for rape and other forms of brutal sexual violence,” says the U.S. State Department. On the other side is Sudan’s military, which has used chemical weapons, and tactics that include “indiscriminate bombing of civilian infrastructure, attacks on schools, markets, and hospitals, and extrajudicial executions,” according to the U.S. Treasury Department.

The Rapid Support Forces are much worse than Sudan’s military, but both sides are brutal.

Last month, the State Department formally declared that the Rapid Support Forces are committing genocide in Sudan, more than a year after the genocide began. As we noted in 2023, “militias aligned with the RSF…referred to locally as the Janjaweed, or ‘devils on horseback’ — were carrying out ethnic killings and have also looted and burned the palace of the sultan of the Masalit tribe. The Janjaweed are ethnically Arab militias; the Masalit are a local African tribe.” Moreover, the “RSF has targeted Masalit refugee camps, killed people attempting to escape to neighboring Chad, kidnapped and raped women and systematically killed influential figures in the community, such as tribal leaders and human rights lawyers and monitors.” The RSF is “engaged in ethnic cleansing in Sudan’s Darfur region, killing non-Arab peoples in Sudan’s Darfur region. It also abducted and killed a provincial governor. Khamis Abakar, the governor of West Darfur, was murdered hours after he accused the RSF of ‘genocide’, in a June 14 statement to a Saudi news channel. He was killed in the city of el-Geneina, the capital of West Darfur. ‘Civilians are being killed randomly and in large numbers,’ he said.”

The RSF has shelled Sudan’s biggest refugee camp, Zamzam, where famine was first declared in Sudan. Half of Sudan’s 50 million people are very hungry. In May the Clingendael Institute, a Dutch think-tank, estimated that hunger and related diseases would kill at least 6 million people in Sudan by 2027.

Sudan’s national museum was looted by the RSF. The museum housed “the world’s largest and most comprehensive Nubian archaeological collection, along with artifacts from other ancient civilizations including the Kingdom of Kush (8th-4th century BCE) and the medieval Kingdom of Alwa. The Nubian collection” included “embalmed mummies dating back to 2,500 BC, making them among the earliest and most important such examples in the world.” The museum also had some Christian relics from Sudan’s pre-Islamic period. Sudan, like Egypt, has pyramids and mummies.

The RSF interfered with harvests in Sudan’s Jazira state, which is “home to one of the largest irrigation systems in the world,” reported CNN. Thousands of farmers fled the RSF into areas controlled by Sudan’s military, leaving fields untended.

Hans Bader

Hans Bader

Hans Bader practices law in Washington, D.C. After studying economics and history at the University of Virginia and law at Harvard, he practiced civil-rights, international-trade, and constitutional law. He also once worked in the Education Department. Hans writes for CNSNews.com and has appeared on C-SPAN’s “Washington Journal.” Contact him at hfb138@yahoo.com

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